by – what else? – the financial crisis of the French state brought on by its inability to meet
the debts it had incurred in aiding the American colonists from 177 8 to 17 8 3.
The Revolution and its warfare
If ever there was an unambiguous demonstration of the power of the political context to
drive strategic history, it was provided by the French Revolution. The transformation in
warfare effected by French commanders, Napoleon in particular, owed next to nothing
to radical advances in military science or equipment. The new potency of French arms
was entirely the product of political and human forces. There is a cautionary lesson here
of which twenty-first-century technophiles would do well to take note.
There is a dynamic to political revolutions which typically, indeed all but invariably,
escapes control by the original revolutionaries. Time after time, in country after country,
those who begin a revolution with fairly modest goals focused upon reform and generally
better governance discover that they have unleashed a tiger that cannot be returned to
its cage. So it was in France in the 1790s, as it was to prove in Russia in 1917 also. The
French Revolution of 17 8 9 began with competing visions of constitutional monarchy
or a liberal republic. By 1799, in the form of Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état, the
visions had transmogrified into the reality of a military dictatorship. Napoleon made
himself First Consul in 1799, First Consul for Life in 1 8 02 and Emperor in 1 8 04. This
text concentrates on the political, military and strategic dimensions of events, but the
social and economic contexts are always significant, too. In the case of France in the late
eighteenth century, behind the noisy politicians and the ambitious soldiers was the social
reality of a demographic explosion which had flooded Paris with unemployed, and
unemployable, young men. These were internal refugees from a countryside whose
family farms could not support them. They were to be prominent among the rioters and
the soldiers of the Revolution. It is worth mentioning that a large surplus of unemployed
young men nearly always provides fuel for extreme political behaviour, from France in
the 1790s to Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world in the 2000s.
The Revolution transformed the political and social contexts for war and peace.
Although the dramatic military events of the warfare of the period tend to attract most
attention, the real story is political. The Revolution made the defence of France a national
concern, a patriotic duty of ‘citizens’ for the first time. The new revolutionary France
was a deadly menace to dynastic order and its legitimacy everywhere. King Louis XVI
was executed on 21 January 1793, with the National Convention having voted for his
execution by 6 8 3 to 3 8. The new republic was ideologically aggressive and it had many
sympathizers abroad among those well-meaning and progressive people who were
attracted to the heady ideals of liberty, fraternity and equality. In the twentieth century,
communist and fascist regimes held similar attractions to naïve foreign idealists.
Austria and Prussia formed an alliance (7 February 1792) which grew into the First
Coalition (26 June 1792–17 October 1797), for the purposes of stifling the Revolution
in France before its radical poison could infect other lands, and of restoring Louis XVI
to his throne. Their decidedly credible military threat was seen off in some style by a
hybrid French Army at Valmy, near Reims, on 20 September 1792. The French won with
a combination of superior artillery, regulars from the former royal army, and a rabble
in arms of enthusiastic volunteers. All in all, they were fortunate. Valmy was not the
From limited war to national war 37